View full sizePhoto by John VallsDebbie Rutt (right) works in Coffee Creek Correctional Facility's organic garden with an inmate. Rutt, a gardener and Portland State University
adjunct faculty member, volunteered to help expand the garden and start a five-week gardening course for inmates.

For five weeks a year, Debbie Rutt goes to prison.

Not as a
sentence for a crime, but because three years ago Rutt planted a garden
in Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville to provide the
female inmates there with the opportunity to learn how to plant, grow
and harvest their own food.

The garden takes up about 6,000 square
feet within the prison walls, but with help from a $10,000 fellowship
Rutt recently received, she hopes to double the space, add a greenhouse
and add sustainable measures for both the garden and the prison.

The fellowship will give her $10,000 to put toward
expanding Coffee Creek’s organic garden, adding a system that catches
rainfall for irrigation and creating a composting program that will use
food waste from the prison’s kitchen.

Rutt, who volunteers all of
her time at Coffee Creek, also hopes to add a greenhouse to the garden
to expand her gardening course beyond the five weeks in the summer it is
now offered. With a greenhouse, the course could be year-round.

“It’s a unique space in a harsh environment,” Rutt said. “I love
gardening, and it’s especially fun to work with people who are eager to
learn.”

Eddie Gonzalez, program manager for Together Green for the
National Audubon Society, said this is the first time a program inside
the prison has been chosen for one of the fellowships. He said Rutt was
chosen because the program not only reaches a group not often exposed to
sustainable gardening, but also because the inmates are able to take
what they learn with them after being released.

Rutt “is working
with an audience of women inside Coffee Creek Correctional Facility,
that’s a community that would be very difficult for (the National
Audubon Society) to engage through our means,” Gonzalez said. “Their
ability to do onsite composting, water harvesting, these are skills
they’ll be able to use no matter where they end up.”

Rutt requires
the inmates participating in her course to plan a garden of their own as
a final project. Another program at the prison allows children of
inmates to visit their mothers while they work in the garden.

“I
think it’s a really powerful experience, and the kids get to take part
in the planting and harvesting,” she said. “It’s a really healing
environment.”

Rutt’s experience at Coffee Creek began when she
volunteered to teach yoga classes to inmates. When she realized the
prison didn’t have the technical and community support to sustain the
garden it had at the time, she offered to help.

Three years
later, the garden produces tomatoes, squash and other vegetables for the
prison’s kitchen, and10 percent of the produce is donated every year to
a community food bank. And last summer, 25 inmates graduated from her
summer course.

“One woman at our graduation ceremony said being in
the garden felt like the only place where she was able to let down her
guard in the prison,” Rutt said. “People talk about spending time there
and for that small amount of time, letting go of the stress.”

During the next 18 months, Rutt will go through training for her
fellowship, and by the end of that time will have the upgrades in place
at Coffee Creek.